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Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Any devoted reader of a
specific author winds up taking a “journey” with them. In this case, I don’t
mean just the journey to the locations in which their books take place, I mean
the journey of discovering their work and the process of acquiring their books.
Which, in the pre-Internet world, was a lot more lively and active hobby. In
the case of comic novelist Max Shulman, I first encountered him in a newly
opened used bookstore in my hometown of Jackson Heights, Queens, a few decades
ago.

I was there with my father, from whom I had acquired my love
of various comedians, from Groucho and Fields to Sellers, Woody, and Mel Brooks
(I developed my fixation with Keaton, Kovacs, and other favorites on my
own in later years). The bookstore in question was a paradise for the rabid
bibliophile, a store jam-packed with paperbacks from floor to ceiling, named
(naturally enough) Jackson Heights Discount Books.

The place was a nirvana (albeit a firetrap nirvana — no
problem for me; in those days I was young and lithe), so filled with books that
I didn’t know where to start. So I wound at the usual stops, as I was moving
away from comic books at this particular time: the movie section (and even
more amazing, several shelves labelled “TV/Movie tie-in”) and the humor
department. Shulman’s books were both in with the general fiction and in the
humor section, shelved with the 20th century’s most important wits and Larry
Wilde ethnic joke books (did I note there was only a vague semblance of
alphabetization in JH Discount Books?).

My father pointed out three or
four humorists I never would’ve found on my own, people whose books he had
loved in the Forties and Fifties. The writer with the hands-down most colorful
covers — boasting cartoons that featured the lead characters (guileless, lovesick males and
cute, ponytailed, busty females) — was Max Shulman.

I read most of Shulman’s books as a preteen but returned to
them recently to see if they were as funny and frantic as I remembered them.
The good news is that they are, and they also contain some sharply drawn (and
sometimes surprisingly nasty) satires of social institutions I couldn’t have
understood when I was younger.

So who was this Shulman guy? Fans of classic TV know him best
as the creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-63), TV’s first
teen show that adopted a teenage “voice” and got right down to the things that
teenagers care about — avoiding schoolwork, finding dates, and obtaining money
from their parents.

The best episodes of the Dobie Gillis
series are either based directly on Shulman’s original short stories (collected
in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, the only Shulman book that is still in print), or they are close variations on the themes he
introduced. Shulman has thus gotten the rep of being a “teen humorist” (he was
of course a middle-aged family man when writing the Dobie TV series), but he in
fact primarily wrote humorous novels that were aimed at adults (particularly his
later novels about suburbia and adultery).

What is most interesting is that while Shulman’s lovesick
protagonists primarily describe people in ways that render them cartoonlike
creations, they will “paint a picture” of their objects of desire that make them
three-dimensional (perhaps because Max knew libidinous young men — and soldiers
— were reading his books….).

[The Feather Merchants, p. 45] I
did not try to conceal my satisfaction as I watched her walk across the
sidewalk to the car. In ten years a Lane Bryant customer without a doubt, but
now — five foot three, 125 pounds, black hair, blue eyes, small nose, small
mouth, pointed chin, milk-white skin, high, disassociated breasts, narrow
waist, a pelvis that could accommodate a pair of water jugs, full-calved legs
which filled her Nylons so completely that if you tried to gather a pinch of
stocking between thumb and forefinger you would fail, narrow ankles, size 4-AAA
shoes. She was wearing a small, dark, veiled hat cocked low over one eye, a
dark blue silk dress which billowed demurely where it didn’t matter, clung
brazenly where it did.

The most striking (and inviting) thing about Shulman’s books
is their light tone. Time critic Richard Corliss, who has
written brilliantly about the most sublime aspects of Fifties culture, has handily summed
up the appeal of Shulman's work: “A bestselling author and anthologist of
college humor, Shulman was a satirist with a sunny disposition… a Woody Allen
without neuroses.” Woody himself put Shulman in the category of Perelman,
Benchley, and Frank Sullivan as having “a real prose style that’s funny.” (Go
to 1:40)

In rereading Shulman’s books, I was struck that his earlier
novels are frequently punctuated by the device that these days is considered
quite original when it appears on Family Guy, namely
“cutaways” that allow the writer to make jokes about other topics, and jolt the audience in the process.

One seeming purpose for Shulman’s many
“cutaways” to other material — usually stories being related by eccentric
characters that our hero encounters — was that this kind of construction
would’ve made it easier for him to excerpt fragments of his books and
potentially sell them to magazines as separate stories. (The novels I’m going to
discuss here are episodic, and can quite easily be “broken apart.”)

Shulman situated his kooky cutaways quite
solidly, though, and they pertain to a rich comic tradition that he referred to
in passing in two of his first three books. In The Feather
Merchants, our soldier-boy antihero meets his English teacher on a
train:

[Feather Merchants, p. 18] “Well,
Daniel, do you remember anything you learned in my English class?”“I was just thinking of something I learned there, Miss
Spinnaker. The Canterbury Tales.”“Why those, Daniel?”“Well, that’s what we’ve been doing on the train — travelers
telling stories to pass the time away.”“Why, so we have,” she said.She felt much better.

One of Shulman’s favorite devices was the use of oddball
names for his characters. Corliss has noted that “Shulman, like W.C. Fields and
Groucho (i.e., his writers Kaufman and Perelman), loved eccentric names.”
Sorority girls Sally Gelt and Wilma Urbane; communist radicals John Das Kapital,
Sam Nihilism, and Natashya Fiveyearplan; and my favorite, the young lovers Bob
Scream and Peggy Orifice.

Shulman’s penchant for “college humor”
early on in his career came from a very legitimate source — he started out
writing for the University of Minnesota humor magazine
Ski-U-Mah. Thus, while his often-zany, sometimes sober, and
sharply satirical writing was very original, it also adhered to a comic
tradition he was all too happy to refer to. In The Zebra Derby,
our hero’s garrulous girlfriend (picturesquely named Nebbice Upcharles), tells
him a story: “This jellyfish I had in mind who was turned into a tiger by love
was a friend of mine named Tristram Shandy. Most timid fellow you ever saw.”

A wink and a nod is thus given to the reader who understands
(or cares) about the grand tradition of comic storytelling in fiction. Over the
course of his nine books, Shulman drew on this tradition to lampoon aspects of
politics, the Army, big business, advertising, television, motherhood,
fatherhood, teenage rebellion, the Fifties flight to the suburbs, and (a
personal fave of mine) false patriotism. He did this all while keeping his heroes schlemiel-type outsiders who feel incredibly awkward when they are “inside” the
system.

His social satire was in fact so
friendly that at points it’s hard to recognize it as satire rather than just
simple comedy. By spotlighting his first three novels, all bestsellers that
were published during WWII from 1943-46 (now sadly out of print), I'd like to
show how he couched very wise and sharp satire in the guise of “good-natured
ribbing.” The three novels in question were collected in one volume called
Max Shulman's Large Economy Size in 1952; I'll be discussing
this particular collection because it provides a great “entryway” to discuss
Shulman's humor and writing style.

There isn't any definitive biography of Shulman online, with
the exception of his New York Times obit. Suffice it
to say that he was born in 1919, the son of a Russian house painter. He grew up
in the Selby-Dale neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn, and was given his first big
break by a Doubleday editor who was on a “talent hunt.”

Shulman supplied this
tongue-in-cheek author bio to the Armed Services edition of his first novel:
“Squat, moon-faced Max Shulman is a twenty-five-year-old sergeant in the Army
Air Force. His life before his enlistment was placid to the point of monotony.
He grew up in a steam-heated house in St. Paul, attended the University of
Minnesota, where he met and married a squat, moon-faced classmate, and was
graduated in 1942.

“While in college he wrote an irreverent column in the student
newspaper, and increased his reputation as a tomfool with his blithe editing of
the campus humor magazine, Ski-U-Mah (an Indian word meaning: ‘Close the
window. Can’t you see it’s raining?’).”

His first novel, Barefoot Boy
with Cheek, was published when he was a mere lad of 24 in 1943. That
title perplexed me for years (this is pre-Internet, kids), until I read
somewhere the 1855 poem “Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier (“Blessings
on thee, little man/Barefoot boy with cheek of tan/with thy turned-up
pantaloons/And thy merry whistled tunes...”).

Chronologically, Shulman came into prominence after the
heyday of the Algonquin wits, was simultaneous with the brilliance of Perelman
and Thurber, and anticipated the delirious anarchy of Mad
magazine. To my mind he was a clear-cut forerunner of Kurtzman and company
because he eagerly populated his early books with over-the-top characters in outlandish situations.

His work was also defined not only by
his own deft comic flourishes, but by those of the illustrators whose drawings
accompanied his text. Playboy cartoonist Eldon Dedini is the
illustrator most identified with Shulman’s work, but Bill Crawford, who
provided the illustrations for the first four novels, also did a great job of
visualizing Shulman’s stranger-than-life vision.

Shulman was not a “Jewish humorist” per se (he could be most
accurately described as “Midwestern”), but he did inject Jewish elements
(names, Yiddish-tinged language, shaggy dog humor) when he thought they would
be funny. The key to his work, especially these early novels, is exactly that —
what would be the most jarring and funniest thing to introduce at a given
point?

And what is funnier than notes made during wartime rationing
on a menu in Yiddish dialect? [Feather Merchants, p. 47]
The menu was unchanged from the last time I had seen it except for
doubled prices and these two notices penciled on the bottom by Hrdlicka, the
partner who could write: “ON ACCOUNT OF THE DURATION, YOU ONLY GET ONE PAT
BUTTER” and “DON’T GET SO HUFFY IF THE SERVICE IS SLOW. HOW DO YOU KNOW MAYBE
YOUR WAITER GAVE A QUART BLOOD THIS AFTERNOON?”

Making Shulman's work eminently re-readable is the
fact that he kept his books short and varied his style, delivering both lengthy
spoofs and fast gags. The specter of the king of quipsters, Groucho, emerges
when Shulman's best tossed-off jokes fly by.

[Barefoot Boy with Cheek, p. 195]
“The legislature was stirred to action. They not only passed the
appropriation, but they also lifted Bryan on their shoulders and carried him
around the Statehouse. This, however, was not too difficult because Bryan was
only six years old at the time and puny for his age.”

One of the things Shulman clearly loved to was to spoof
purple prose, from desiccated classics to poorly written pop fiction (which
inevitably tops the bestseller list – then and now).

[The Zebra Derby, p. 190]
”Lodestone! Lodestone! Lodestone!” The name cascaded from my lips, and
then the name was gone and there were only sounds, deep-throated yet curiously
tender. Then there was a sweet flailing, a dulcet thrashing, a soft probing.
Urgency came and controlled desperation and desperate control. Then colors that
were heard and sounds that were seen, a chromatic arpeggio, an audible
pastiche. Then a settling. A fast settling. A slower settling. A slow settling.
Settled.”

The central question that haunts humor
writing is whether or not it is dated — because, much as each generation's
notion of what is sexy is very specific, the notion of what is funny is just as
specific and often sadly short-lived. In its particulars Shulman's work is
indeed dated — two of his early novels concern the war and the way it turned
American life upside down; in his later books he tackled consumer society in
the Fifties and Sixties (which is once again of interest, thanks to
Mad Men).

Like most great humor, though, Shulman's best work is
timeless. Guys are always going to be pathetic lovesick creatures when
confronted by their dream girl, some Americans will always take their
patriotism to ridiculous lengths, and underdogs will always be trying to “beat
the system” with hastily conceived schemes.

Which brings me to the first item in Large Economy
Size, an essay called “How to be a Writer, or Oblivion Made Simple.”
Written in 1948, the piece spoofs many formulas for good writing that have been
dispensed over the years. Shulman loved to mock such quick fixes and so he
offers a few incredibly simple and silly rules.

In the process he ends up showing how ridiculous any set of
ironclad "instructions" for creativity can be. His exploration of all the possible types of flashbacks reaches brilliant levels of weird invention:

[from Large Economy Size:] False telescoping true flashback —
A character remembers an incident in his past. The incident is
narrated. This incident really happened. A character who appears during
the narration of this incident remembers an incident in his past. This incident is narrated. This incident never happened.

Here he's making things as ridiculous as possible, but damned if he also wasn't anticipating the "everything is possible" approach of the later French nouveau
roman novelists, for whom all narratives could exist
simultaneously.

BAREFOOT BOY WITH CHEEKShulman’s first three novels, the second and third written
while he was in the Army Air Corps, are contained in Large Economy
Size. Shulman’s debut novel is told from the point of view of an
eternally optimistic — some might say dense — character, one Asa Hearthrug. Asa
is from farming stock, but he dreams of going to college, and so he is thrilled
to be enrolled as a freshman at the University of Minnesota.

He quickly is recruited by a fraternity and (like many
lovesick Shulman heroes) falls for not one but two girls, sorority sister
Noblesse Oblige and the fiery communist lass Yetta Samovar. At one point
Shulman offers us a comic tour of his alma mater while Asa ponders his romantic
fate.

The book ends with him returning to his original hillbilly
girlfriend, Lodestone La Toole. As the above synopsis indicates, the plot is
merely present to provide premises for comic set-pieces (and crazy stories told
to Asa, many crazy stories). Shulman toned down the cartoonishness of his
universe as he went along, but he was always game to insert a digression if it
was funny enough and produced a properly deadpan reaction from our clueless
hero, who acknowledges all he hears as being equally profound. (There are overt
references to Chaucer and Sterne in this trilogy, but I’d also be willing to
bet that Shulman had read or was well aware of Candide.)

Barefoot Boy with
Cheek was turned into a Broadway musical in 1947 (the show ran four
months). Shulman wrote the book, with music by Sidney Lippman and lyrics by
Sylvia Dee. Yetta Samovar was played by later TV star Nancy Walker (Rhoda’s
mother and director of Can’t Stop the Music!); the
wonderfully monikered Shyster Fiscal was played by a young Red Buttons.

The star was William Redfield, a noted character actor who
is best known for his work in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest, among many other supporting roles. More interesting to me:
Redfield either cowrote or himself wrote Mr. Peepers, a sort of
novel, the tie-in book for the Mr. Peepers TV show
(I love the series and was surprised to also love the book); he’s thanked by
Wally Cox (the only listed author on the title page) for his help on the book.

THE FEATHER MERCHANTSI will confess that, as a teen, I
never read two of Shulman’s novels — Anyone Got a Match,
because I couldn’t find a copy of it in the used bookstore or at the library,
and this book, because I didn’t enjoy “service comedies” (Abbott and Costello’s
Buck Privates, Martin and Lewis’ At War with the
Army, etc). As an adult I now realize that it is inarguably the best
early Shulman, because it isn’t a service comedy but is instead a priceless satire
of faux patriotism and self-aggrandizement by civilians during wartime.

Shulman was such an amiable, charming humorist that he was
able to get away with sentiment that might’ve seemed phony coming from another
writer. And so The Feather Merchants offers a fascinating and
funny reflection on the “greatest generation” and how their service was being
acknowledged while WWII was going on (their not-so-glamorous return home became
the subject of Shulman’s next novel).

Our hero here, Sgt. Dan Miller, is a sharper character than
Asa Hearthrug. He understands what is going on around him but is powerless to
do anything about it. He is a very unheroic hero — serving time in Oklahoma
instead of overseas —who is constantly lectured by his friends and neighbors
about the ways in which they are helping fight the war. He
is branded a hero when a friend’s fake story (told, natch, to impress some
girls) is picked up by the local press, and suddenly he has to figure out how
to be the “demolitions expert” he’s supposed to be.

There are a number of very funny and bizarre moments in the
book, but my personal favorite has to do with a visit to a strip club. An
extremely patriotic strip club…

The Zebra DerbyThe last book in the trilogy features Asa Hearthrug again,
this time as an ex-solider whose family does not want to hear his tales of
battle.

[The Zebra Derby, pp. 8-9] "How
ghastly it must have been in the miasms of the Pacific. But of course you don’t
want to talk about it.”“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do.”“That’s all right, Son,” said Father. “You don’t have to.
I’ll understand.” “But I want to.”“No, Son, no. Don’t wake a flood of horrendous memories on
my account. I know how it was. Didn’t I see Don Ameche get it in the guts in Perils of the Pacific, in the head in Beast of the
East, in the thighbone in Hara-Kiri for Two, in the
spleen in My Mother Was a Flat-Top, and true in the heart in
I Love to See Dat Risin’ Sun Go Down? Do you think
I don’t know how it was?”

Shulman spoofs the ads that tout
companies’ participation in, as we now call it, “supporting the troops”
(“Having contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of our insidious
enemies… LUCKY STRIKE GREEN IS BACK FROM WAR.”) Some of the most memorable
scenes in the book, though, concern Asa’s attempts to find a job and, when that
fails, trying to fit in back at the University of Minnesota. At one point a
veterans’ program adviser (named “Max Ivycovered”) swears he’ll help Asa
overcome his supposed killer instinct.

[The Zebra Derby, pp. 170-71]
Mr. Ivycovered shrugged. “We've got to let you go to school,
Hearthrug. It's your right, even if you have been turned into a ravening beast,
a bloodthirsty engine of destruction.”
I snarled and kicked over a lamp.“How can we expect to interest you in the liberal arts?”
said Mr. Ivycovered. “How can the humanities and social sciences claim your
attention? For you have been schooled in mayhem and uproar, in ferocity and
tumult, in outrage and infraction.”I upset a settee and clawed plaster from the walls.“All barriers have been stripped from you,” said Mr.
Ivycovered. “You demand commotion and frenzy, rampage and fulmination,
turbulence and riot.”I butted my head through a window and set fire to a
bookcase.While Zebra is written in the same
broadly comic style as the preceding books, Shulman does a brilliant job
in one scene (a radio show heard by Asa on the radio) spoofing corporate America and its vision of a free and unfettered post-war
climate. A gathering of "the National Association of Rich Millionaires" discusses how important it is that the government not regulate their companies' activity. (As I noted, good humor is always timeless....)

Lest he be thought of as some kind of socialist (not that
there’s anything wrong with that), Shulman devotes a good amount of space to
describing a wonderfully awful communist play later in the book. (“MAX: We are
undone. SWEET ALICE: I am tired. I think I will sleep now and have a dream
sequence.”)

Large Economy Size represents the
first “era” of Shulman's writings. His Fifties books offered up the ultimate vision
of the frustrated but resourceful American teenager in Dobie Gillis. He
followed his cartoonlike, episodic novels with two more conventionally
structured novels (Rally Round the Flag, Boys and
Anyone Got a Match?) that dovetail perfectly with the
colorful, wonderful critiques of consumerism by Funhouse favorites George
Axelrod and Frank Tashlin.

I hope to write more about Shulman, but will note that his
final two creations — the 1978 movie House Calls (he also
subsequently scripted an episode for the short-lived 1979 TV series derived
from the movie) and the comic novel Potatoes Are Cheaper —
showed that he still had the same light touch and sharp satirical sensibility
in later life that he had as a young tyro writing this trilogy.

There was a lot more to the guy than Dobie Gillis….

NOTE: The quotations and Max Shulman passages above
are copyrighted by the Estate of Max Shulman. This blog entry was intended as a
study of Shulman’s work; the books can be found at very reasonably prices (with
the original, awesome covers and illustrations!) on both Amazon and eBay. My thanks goes out to
RC for the quotes about MS, and my dad for pointing the way in the first
place.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Comedy fans “of a certain age” are
in mourning today because the last of the great novelty record
masters is gone. Stan Freberg, who died yesterday at 88, had a career
that could've only existed in the Fifties. Freberg is best known for
two things: a series of comedy singles that were essentially pieces
of radio comedy retooled for the shorter, tighter 45 format; and a
series of TV ads that were bold, brash, self-referential, silly, and
yet still hyped the products in question.

There will no doubt be many encomiums
thrown Stan's way, and rightly so. I just wanted to focus in on the
moment at which John Lennon appropriated one of Stan's old ideas and
turned it into an avant-garde “experiment.”

Firstly, Freberg talking about his
interactions with John and Yoko on talk shows. When he came on Dick
Cavett's ABC show, he was informed that he would be on an episode
that contained the remainder of an interview with John and Yoko, and
he noted that that same thing had happened when he'd been on David
Frost's show in London:

The fact that Lennon knew who Freberg
was and wanted to meet him makes perfect sense, as John was a Spike
Milligan cultist who counted master-humorists Peter Cook and Viv Stanshall (gents he
inspired and whom I would argue inspired him greatly) among his friends in
mid-Sixties Swinging London.

John most certainly knew Stan's popular
singles, and one in particular, called “John and Marsha,” in
which two voices (Freberg as both John and Marsha) act out a full
soap opera in two and a half minutes by just saying each other's
names in different ways.

Yoko Ono has been accused by
commentators like Camille Paglia of having taken away John's sense of
humor, a notion that is patently untrue. Well, on further thought, it
did occasionally seem like it was true —
not in the political
moments so much as the avant-garde experimental mode where the “Joko”
team created music, films, and epigrammatic poetry that seemed to be
ripe for satire.Their three LPs together, the
Unfinished Music duo and Wedding
Album, are works executed in this mode. I am a devoted Lennon
fan, but even in my most diehard period of Beatle worship, I knew I
would listen one time and one time only to each of these LPs, so I
stopped even trying to acquire them (after finding an inexpensively
priced copy of Two Virgins, playing it once, and
realizing that the old nasty “play the album cover and throw the
album away” review wasn't far from wrong).

On the 1969 LP Wedding
Album, which was more of a commemorative package of the
Lennons' wedding (a box filled with various artifacts, including a
photo of wedding cake) than any kind of actually doted-on album, John
(or Yoko, or both, or some engineer they supervised) assembled an
audio collage of Lennon-Ono interviews for the second side of the
album.

The first side, however, contained a
specially recorded item, “John and Yoko,” a 22-minute experiment
in which the Lennons said each other's names over and over in
different tones while a recording of their heartbeats was heard
throbbin' away. The piece does start out as a joke, with John and
Yoko goofing around, but at various points they do try to reign it in
and pretend they're having sex or nuzzling each other, or “losing”
each other. In other words, they try to be serious, while
“appropriating” (let's be kind) a concept that Freberg did at
one-eleventh the length as a purely comic notion.

It is mighty silly, and you will most
likely never listen to it more than once, but now, thanks to the
wonder that is YouTube, we can readily summon up both Stan's original
and John and Yoko's “variation on a theme.” The Freberg name
appears nowhere in the album's credits (then again, this is around
the time that John unconsciously transformed Chuck Berry's “You
Can't Catch Me” into “Come Together”), but John did say
that they recorded it as “an extended, very extreme version of
'John and Marsha' that was out years ago by Stan Freberg.”

He
also said, “It also really makes your hair stand on end.” The
latter makes it appear that, yes, they weren't totally fooling around
with this album side-long riff on a two-and-a-half-minute novelty
record. Perhaps it isn't as Paglia believes, that Yoko was neutering
John's sense of humor — perhaps it was just the drugs....

*****

As a bonus, I will note that I am
proud to have featured Stan's Chun King-sponsored Chinese New Year
special from 1962 on the Funhouse TV show (and will probably rerun
that episode soon) more than once. I was unaware that he made
another, somewhat similar, special in 1980.

Stan's “Federal Budget Revue” was a
PBS special in which he talked, sang, and danced about government
expenditures. Freberg lives up to his appearance here (he had the
look of a Fifties “egghead” smart-guy), but the best part of the
show, as was always the case with Stan, are his musical numbers,
arranged by the great Billy May. The whole half-hour show can be seen
here:

Friday, April 3, 2015

I don't want to make my tribute to Gene
Saks an echo of my goodbye piece to Mike Nichols, but since he
achieved his greatest fame as a director of comic plays (and was also
associated with Neil Simon), let me run quickly through a few of the
same points. The first and most important is that, while in film the
director is truly the “auteur,” onstage (and most
definitely in the kinds of plays that Saks and Nichols directed), the
playwright is everything. And what he/she isn't, the performers are.

I'm not the biggest fan of Saks as a
movie director – he made eight films, a few of which were very
funny, but all of which had no discernible style. As was the case
with Nichols, though, I absolutely loved Saks to pieces as a
performer. To return to his direction for a bit, I will note that, it is said that Saks did his finest work
as a director for the Broadway stage.

I saw only three productions of Neil Simon plays he
staged (and the last one was reworked by another director). I found
the first one mesmerizing, because it was the very first Broadway
play I saw as a child, California Suite. (So the experience was more memorable than the play itself.)

I have the feeling I wouldn't find it
as mesmerizing these days (and the other, Jake's Women,
was somewhat torturous). Neil Simon, the undisputed king (in terms of
success) of Broadway comic playwrights, had certain rhythms to his
work. His plays of the Sixties and early Seventies are wonderfully
charming and have some delightful situations and characters – they
are prime meat for good performers to make hay with and steal a
scene. Thus the key to directing his work, and in my mind the key to theatrical direction, is working very closely and sympathetically with the actors (the visuals are the turf of the set designer; the action is purely the playwright's domain).

Simon's plays are, to my mind,
director-proof; it didn't matter which director supervised them
onstage, they would've turned out pretty much the same (assuming the director had any innate talent and could make the wise
casting decisions that make or break a B'way hit).

There was an overt sentimentality that
plagued Simon's later works. He wanted to convey something
*important*, goddammit! For me, The
Prisoner of Second Avenue is his masterpiece (first staged in 1971, during the thick of his most productive period in NYC). It is one of his few pieces where the emotion flows beautifully and not artificially. It also doesn't "date," since a good deal of its plot is about the middle-aged protagonist's struggle to find work after being laid off.

I noted in my obit for Nichols that, if
I wasn't aware of which film director made which picture, I would
find it hard to distinguish between the work of Saks, Nichols, Arthur
Hiller, and Herbert Ross – I should add Melvin Frank here, because
he is the one who directed the film of Prisoner in
1975.

I recently rewatched The Odd
Couple (1968) and Last of the Red Hot Lovers
(1972), both directed by Saks. Both films contain funny dialogue and
situations, and both star supremely talented comic actors. Any one
of the directors mentioned above (or several others who made similar
films in the Sixties and Seventies) could've made them and they
would've been pretty much identical.

My experience seeing Saks' movie
Mame (1974) as a small kid was memorable as well, in that it
alienated my mother (who loves movie musicals to pieces). It is
painfully rendered – most likely due to the fact that Lucille
Ball's ego outshone everything else involved in the production (and
every single close-up of her is seen through a lens caked with
Vaseline).*****

So let me now rhapsodize about Saks the
performer. He began in show business as an actor, but he appeared in
less than a dozen roles on TV and in film after his directing career
took off. To illustrate the point that it ain't how much you do but
how well you do it (think of Laughton and his one work as a
filmmaker), Saks was a tremendous scene-stealer as a movie performer.
He was offered the supporting role of Jack Lemmon's brother in the
film version of Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)
and is just beautiful as the less-loved sibling who, in the end, is
the only one who really cares about our neurotic hero besides his
wife.

While Neil Simon was the most
successful comic playwright of the Sixties and Seventies and did some
truly wonderful work, for me Herb Gardner remains the true master
(with Murray Schisgal coming up close behind). And, in Gardner's
work, there was no better scene-stealer than Gene Saks.

Thus, while Saks acquired a sterling
reputation as a comedy director on B'way (and, to a lesser extent, in
the movies), for those who have seen and loved A Thousand
Clowns (1965), he will forever be known as Leo Herman, aka
“Chuckles the Chipmunk,” the former employer of Murray Burns
(Jason Robards). Chuckles is a hyperactive kiddie-show host who gets
nervous around children.

Gardner spoke at the Film Forum in NYC
in the Nineties and decided to reveal where the character of Chuckles
came from. He told us how he had once worked for Bob Keeshan, alias
Captain Kangaroo, and that Bob was incredibly nervous around children
(he also mentioned that the Captain kept flasks in those big
pockets).

This was one way in which the character
of Murray was based on Gardner himself – I asked Gardner at a book
signing if Murray was based on Jean Shepherd, and he said that Jean
believed that but it wasn't so. Murray, Gardner said, was based on
his own bachelor life and behavior. (Attention Shep biographer Eugene
Bergmann and others who have repeated Jean's accusation!)

The way Saks plays him, Chuckles is
nothing like Capt. Kangaroo, but we've all met people like him – a
well-meaning but dense guy in a position of power who claims he's
looking for something better to do with his life, but in the meantime
keeps doing the mediocre stuff. Saks literally does steal the show
away from Robards for awhile (which is amazing, given how wonderful
Robards is throughout the picture).

Another thing Gardner revealed at
the Film Forum: Saks was the first choice for the role but was
unavailable. They shot the Chuckles sequence with another actor and
it wasn't working. Saks somehow found the time, and so they reshot
the scene, but only the angles that involved Chuckles on his own, or
he and Murray or Nick (Barry Gordon). Thus, the cardboard cutout of
Chuckles changes from shot to shot – when it's seen clearly it's
Saks, but when it's in long shot you can see another face. [UPDATE: Fellow Gardner-fan and all-around comedy expert/aficionado Bob Claster has uncovered the identity of the original Chuckles, whose face is seen on the cutout in long shots: character actor Paul Richards. Thanks much, Bob!]

Saks did the scene-stealing honors in
Gardner's film of his play The Goodbye People
(1984). I featured scenes from the film a few months back on the
Funhouse TV show (where I'm always showing stuff you ain't seein'
anyplace else!), because it has pretty much been forgotten. No DVD
release, no bootlegs, a friend noted it isn't even haunting the
darkest depths of the Bit Torrents, where much of cinema history is
tucked away.

The Goodbye People
was clearly a labor of love for Gardner, because he kept mounting the
play over and over again, and it kept failing. It's a classic Herb
Gardner tale of the struggle for nonconformity: a boisterous old man
(Martin Balsam) who has been having health trouble wants to resurrect
his old hot dog stand on the Coney Island boardwalk in the middle of
the cold season. He lures a nervous dreamer (Judd Hirsch) into his
plan, as well as his daughter (Pamela Reed).

Gardner directed it when it bowed on
Broadway in Dec. 1968 with Bob Dishy as the dreamer, Brenda Vaccaro
as the daughter, and Milton Berle (!) as the old man. The play failed
then, but he got it restaged in L.A. in 1979 (directed by Jeff
Bleckner) with Peter Bonerz as the dreamer, Patty Duke Astin as the
daughter, and Herschel Bernardi as the old man. It hit B'way again in
'79 with Ron Rifkin, Melanie Mayron, and Bernardi in the leads.

Elaine May intro'd The Goodbye
People in the book Herb Gardner: The Collected
Plays, noting that she directed Gardner's rewritten version
of the play (he clearly never did give up on it!) as it debuted in
Stockbridge, Massachusetts (presumably pre-B'way in '79). She listed
the cast as Gabe Dell, the great Zohra Lampert, and Gene Saks – one
assumes he played the old man in this instance.

From May's intro: "It is a quintessential play about America, about discounting the odds, about having hope without evidence, about the refusal to accept old age or anything else without an argument, about thumbing your nose at death with dignity and, in fact, thumbing your nose at dignity. It is about the tough, unregenerate, screw-you exhilaration of the old West, still alive and doing business in Coney Island."

In the film Gardner cast Saks as the
old man's business partner who has sold out his interest in the hot
dog stand to a big chain (the role had been played by the same actor,
Sammy Smith, in both B'way productions and the '79 L.A. run). Saks
winds up stealing the picture again, this time with an even shorter
appearance than he had in A Thousand Clowns.

His character, Marcus Soloway, delivers
a monologue on how he's happy being an old man, a speech that I
should note Gardner wrote when he was in his early 30s. I uploaded
this scene to YouTube myself (and, yes, it came from a VHS prerecord!) because I wanted to share Saks
scene-stealing magic – and Gardner's truly sublime writing.